duckzilla wrote:Regarding french water play, I usually build a dock in age II if time and resources permit. Since your eco will only take up 80 pop, you basically have a further 20 pop space to use for fishing boats. Having a dock already build allows you to intervene in an opponent's water boom or do some small-scale water boom on your own whenever you have spare wood.

Importantly, I would not suggest to send shipments to improve fishing boats (you will not build that many anyway) and also be reluctant to include naval cards into the deck (maybe the one giving +25% hp/dmg). Using the fishing boats to gather coin also results in less apms needed to administer your economy.

cuirs are quite pop-heavy, and French economy is already pretty good, I don't think fishing boats are overly necessary once you've maxed out the vills; instead, you could build popless canoes

Good point on canoes, if you actually have natives to access them (e.g. not on Patagonia). Fishing boats are definitely not necessary, but I see a benefit in being more flexible by building a dock. Cuirs may be considered as pop heavy, but given that they are also far stronger than any other cav unit, you can easily afford extra eco pop-wise without being overwhelmed.

The good thing about extra-eco is the snowball effect which is especially strong for French, since their late-game eco as well as their unit combinations are top tier.

That's also what makes Dutch comparably weak to me: they may have a strong eco in mid-game but there is no real snowball effect since their eco cannot compete at some point. Very frustrating to have a lot of pop-space without really knowing how to fill it since either your units are crap or you don't have the eco (on non-water maps) to support using the whole pop-space.

"To counter the pike-boom, you must become the pike-boom." - Karl V. (HRE)